Balance the Shopping Load This Christmas
Online spending last Christmas exceeded £3 billion (approx. $5.4 billion) in the UK alone. With e-retailing industry body IMRG predicting a further 40% increase this year, online retailers cannot afford any downtime this festive season if they want
Online spending last Christmas exceeded £3 billion (approx. $5.4 billion) in the UK alone. With e-retailing industry body IMRG predicting a further 40% increase this year, online retailers cannot afford any downtime this festive season if they want to grab a slice of the festive pie.
Steve Palmer, vice-president of marketing at Zeus Technology comments, "Customers today are becoming increasingly unforgiving. If you experience any downtime or slow performance you risk customers abandoning your site for a competitor. By implementing Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM) organizations can feel reassured that their website will cope with traffic 24 hours a day, 365 days a year."
Steve Broadhead, founder of Broadband-Testing, will today put ZXTMappliances through its paces using Spirent Communications testingequipment. The testing will replicate a day in the life of an e-commercecompany, and focuses on three key areas:
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Flash floods
Set up to imitate the amount of online traffic that ZXTM can simultaneously accommodate, this demonstrates how to effectively manage surges in user activity through service level monitoring and bandwidth management -
The impact of SSL transactions
SSL transactions heavily load servers, but with an increased focus on security, the number of SSL connections is significantly rising. Offloading process intensive tasks to ZXTM dramatically accelerates performance -
XML content rewriting and processing
With XML cited by industry leaders as the key to the future, this demonstration emphasizes the power of ZXTM's content rewrite and XML processing capabilities. ZXTM is the only traffic managing solution to inspect, rewrite and route XML request and response data.
The results will demonstrate why this award-winning software is leading the traffic management market. By combining the functions of traffic management, security and application acceleration in a single, scalable solution, Zeus Technology's flagship product ensures website infrastructures can cope with traffic loads not just during the festive season, but all day, every day, year round.
One online retailer has seen clear benefits since deploying ZXTM, experiencing zero downtime since implementation. Virgin Holidays, who carry more than 350,000 holiday makers each year, have added resilience and load balancing capabilities to their Virgin Holidays web booking server infrastructure, improving overall performance and providing customers with a simple, seamless and secure method of booking the holiday of their choice.
Steve Palmer discusses the issues faced by retailers at this time of year, "To cope with this huge seasonal demand, it is critical that web infrastructures can intelligently manage peaks in traffic and remain secure, fast and available around the clock to satisfy and enhance end-user experience. In the Christmas rush online retailers are under increasing pressure from savvy consumers shopping late to secure the best deal, and a competitors' site is only a click away."
He continues, "Failure to anticipate how applications will respond to high volumes of traffic will result in embarrassing outage situations, as a leading high street retail store discovered to its cost in the run up to last Christmas. The victim of its own success, their website was down for two hours after too many users tried to purchase online in the pre-Christmas sale."
Steve adds, "Staging of live scenarios and real-time capacity planning are the only ways to reduce the risk of downtime, and minimize the resulting revenue loss and corporate brand damage. By staging website loads and responses in a live environment, businesses with online operations can ensure that they have the bandwidth available to maintain systems and uptime, even with higher than expected peak volumes."
© Zeus Technology Ltd